To manage a system effectively, you might focus on the interactions of the parts rather than their behavior taken separately.

Common sense … has the very curious property of being more correct retrospectively than prospectively. It seems to me that one of the principal criteria to be applied to successful science is that its results are almost always obvious retrospectively; unfortunately, they seldom are prospectively. Common sense provides a kind of ultimate validation after science has completed its work; it seldom anticipates what science is going to discover.

Unless people can express themselves well in ordinary English, they don't know what they are talking about.

Art inspires, produces an unwillingness to settle for what we have and a desire for something better. It is the product and producer of creative activity, change; it is essential for continuous development.

In systems thinking, increases in understanding are believed to be obtainable by expanding the systems to be understood, not by reducing them to their elements. Understanding proceeds from the whole to its parts, not from the parts to the whole as knowledge does.

Managers who don't know how to measure what they want settle for wanting what they can measure.

A bureaucrat is one who has the power to say "no" but none to say "yes."